The Secret Daughter. Catherine Spencer

liar, pants on fire!”

      The devil of it was, she was right. If Imogen were to be honest, she’d have to admit she’d never been able to forget Joe Donnelly. Not that she didn’t try—and even come close to succeeding much of the time. Weeks, even months might go by without her thinking of him, especially when she was involved in a project. Helping a client decide between faux marble or French silk wall treatments didn’t exactly trigger her memory of him.

      But when it came to romance, she’d find herself comparing the current man in her life to a black-haired, sultry-eyed rebel with a smile as handsome and dangerously knowing as sin and a way with words that could persuade a saint to stray.

      By the time she’d tell herself that, in the nine years since she’d seen him, Joe Donnelly probably had degenerated into a shiftless, beer-swigging layabout, run to fat and, like his father, lost most of his hair, it was too late. Whatever spark might have existed between her and the Tom, Dick or Harry of the moment had already fizzled and died.

      “I gather from your silence that I’ve touched a nerve,” Tanya observed.

      “Not at all.”

      “Oh, come on, Imogen! You’re still hung up on the guy. Admit it.”

      “I remember him, of course,” Imogen said, truly trying to be objective, “but to say I’m hung up on him is absurd. The last time I saw him, I’d just turned eighteen and was barely out of school—a girl with a crush on a man who seemed attractive because he was a few years older and had something of a reputation around town. I’ve matured since then. Motorcycle hoods no longer strike me as appealing.”

      “A woman never loses her fascination for the man who introduces her to love.”

      “I have.”

      “Then there’s no reason you can’t go home again, is there?”

      “No reason at all,” Imogen said, the same pride that had kept her from reconciling with her mother rising up to back her into another kind of corner.

      “And since you’re so mature, you’ll find it in your heart to kiss and make up with Mother?”

      Well, why not? Imogen chewed the end of her pencil and considered the merits of such a move. Going home would necessarily mean raking up some painful aspects of the past, but wasn’t it time she laid to rest the ghosts that had haunted her for over eight years? The important thing was to be selective in her remembering, to focus only on her relationship with her mother and not to allow herself to become bogged down in useless regrets over a man who had never spared her a second thought once he’d introduced her to sex.

      As long as she stuck to that resolve and remained in charge of her emotions, nothing could really go wrong. Or so she thought.

      “All right, you’ve convinced me,” she told Tanya. “I’ll accept the invitation and see if I can’t work something out with my mother.”

      

      But nothing went as planned, starting with her arrival, one afternoon toward the end of June, at Deepdene Grange, her family’s estate and possibly the only property in town whose house warranted the description “mansion.”

      “Madam is not at home,” the maid, a total stranger, informed her, standing guard at the door as if she feared Imogen might take the place by storm.

      Imogen stared at her, speechless. In the month before she’d set out from Vancouver, she’d suffered more than a few qualms about the wisdom of her decision to go home again, but her misgivings had taken serious hold when she’d picked up her rental car at Pearson International and headed northeast, away from the sticky humidity of Toronto and toward cottage country. What if all she did was make things worse and widen the gulf between her and her mother?

      By the time she’d reached Clifton Hill, Rosemont’s toniest residential area, and turned in at Deepdene’s big iron gates, nervous anticipation the size and texture of a lump of clay hung in the pit of her stomach. But she’d come this far, and nothing, she thought, could deter her.

      Except this.

      “Not at home?” she echoed, shaking her head in the way people do when they’re not sure they understand the language being spoken.

      The maid didn’t so much as blink. “I’m afraid not.”

      But it was four o’clock on Saturday, the hour when, winter or summer for as far back as Imogen could remember, Suzanne Palmer had taken afternoon tea in the solarium prior to dressing for whatever social function she was holding or attending that evening.

      As though to verify that she’d come to the right house, Imogen peered over the maid’s shoulder. The foyer looked exactly as it always had. The Waterford crystal chandelier sparkled in the sunlight, the carved oak banister gleamed, the hand-knotted Persian stair runner glowed softly. Even the bowl of roses on the console beneath the ornate gilt mirror might have been the very same as that occupying the identical spot, the day she’d walked out of her home almost nine years before, believing, at the time, that she would never return.

      The maid shifted to block her view and narrowed the angle of the open door. “Who may I say called?”

      “What?” Already becoming enmeshed in the past, Imogen gave herself a mental shake and steered her attention to the present. “Oh! Her daughter.”

      Too well-trained to betray surprise by more than a faint lifting of her eyebrows, the maid said, “Madam is gone for the weekend but she should be home by late tomorrow afternoon. She didn’t mention anything about a guest.”

      Unwilling to give her mother the chance to reject her a second time, Imogen had booked a room at the town’s only good hotel—a wise precaution indeed, since Suzanne Palmer clearly had declined to inform her current household staff that she had a daughter. “She wasn’t expecting me. I’m staying at the Briarwood. However, I would like to leave a note telling her I’m in town.”

      “I’ll be happy to give her a message.”

      “I’d prefer to leave a note.” Not giving her time to protest, Imogen stepped past the maid into the foyer.

      She’d have thought her familiarity with the layout of Deepdene Grange and the exact location of her mother’s private sitting room would have lent credibility to her claim of having grown up in the house but, face tight with suspicion, the maid stuck to her like glue.

      “Madam prefers not to have her private papers disturbed,” she objected, as Imogen sat at Suzanne’s pretty little Empire writing desk and lowered the lid.

      “Madam” had preferred not to acknowledge her wayward daughter’s behavior nine years ago, but she hadn’t been able to change its outcome. “I’ll make sure you’re not held responsible for my actions,” Imogen said, “and if it eases your mind any, I have no intention at all of invading my mother’s privacy.”

      In fact, though, she did just that. Reaching into one of the pigeonholes for a slip of paper, she accidentally dislodged a sheaf of canceled checks, some of which fluttered into her lap and others to the polished floor.

      With an exclamation of distress, the maid stooped to retrieve those on the floor while Imogen gathered the rest. “No harm done,” she said, aligning hers into a neat pile by tapping the edges smartly on the desk.

      “But they were arranged by number,” the young maid almost whimpered. “Madam is very particular about things like that.”

      Then little had changed, after all! “She always was,” Imogen said, “but as long as they’re left the way I found them, she’ll never know the difference.”

      Quickly, she shuffled the various checks into the proper sequence: number 489, made out to the Municipality of Rosemont for annual property taxes, number 488 to the telephone company and number 487, a tidy sum payable to St. Martha’s, her mother’s old private school, in Norbury, about forty miles west of Niagara Falls.

      Imogen wasn’t